When photography and drawing meet fashion

Group exhibition of the recent work of seventeen artists, designers and researchers from London college of Fashion (including Stephen Farthing, Charlotte Hodes, Lucy Orta, Simon Thorogood, and Sandy Black) curated by Charlotte Hodes.

The exhibition aimed to show the diversity and applications for drawing and photography giving an insight into the origins of exploration.

When Photography and Drawing Meet Fashion grew out of the successful exhibition 'Drawing Towards Fashion' at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London which was staged in 2007. This exhibition had highlighted the multitude of approaches towards drawing inherent in the work of artists, designers and researchers at London College of Fashion. It was clear from this exhibition that the role of drawing is often an invisible process in the creative field of fashion. Furthermore, it was felt that by adding photography, a new and more ambitious exhibition could be formed, building on these concerns, which would provide insights into the genesis of ideas in the fashion industry. The exhibition highlighted that drawing is often the invisible process within the creative field of fashion.

Outline of Contributions:

Jeremy Radvan combines both the process of digital drawing and film. In Myriorama, the moving drawn line is superimposed simultaneously over the performance of a female dancer. This delightful and thoughtfully constructed animation, embedded in direct observational drawing, is concerned with the gesture and meaning held within a drawn line, the image being experienced through time. Gesture in drawing is central to the way in which Ian Simpson creates his textile designs. He also works digitally, using a multitude of sourced photographic fragments, drawn and scribbled marks of various scales which he uses to create sumptuous printed cacophonies on silk.

Collage is similarly central to my practice (Charlotte Hodes) where a combination of observed hands-on drawing with pencil and photographs, historical and contemporary images, are used as a visual archive for papercuts. The scalpel blade is used as an equivalent drawing tool to cut the fragments which are then pasted together on paper to create layered imagery.

In contrast, the drawing tools for Frances Geesin include heat guns and hot knives with which she manipulates thermo plastics and fibres that are subsequently electroplated to produce textiles of extraordinary delicacy and beauty.

This very tactile and physical manipulation of material can be seen in the series 42 Days by Dai Rees whose leather drawings are dyed, painted, inscribed, inlaid and embellished. These moving and evocative leather tablets are a response to the events of the Iraq War as recorded by Orange World News and BBC News 24. The physical treatment of the leather references the venerability of the skin, and indeed of life, in times of war.

Real but banal events are part of Kenny Macleod’s haunting film, in which a male figure finds himself alone in the top floor of an empty modern office block. The environment enhances the man’s sense of displacement in terms of events, time and communication. In one sequence the figure removes and tears up his own clothes, lays them like a paper pattern neatly on the floor and then reconstructs them using a sewing machine which both humorously mocks the fashion industry whilst also revealing its inherent creative impulse.

Real personalities from the East End of London are photographed in Gavin Fernandes’ challenging fashion images. His powerful and sensuous photographs are carefully composed. Here, photography meets fashion as a challenge, addressing issues of cultural identity, gender and religion.

Karin Askham’s coloured photographs capture an innate timelessness, moments in the lives of characters living in a village Aschi Alto, in Italy. The photographs address the observed juxtapositions between contemporary lifestyle and traditional Italian life.

For Ceri Isaac and Stephen Farthing, photography is a starting point for their work. The former takes photographs of archaeological artefacts and biological specimens, the meanings of which she manipulates through the digital process onto fabric, transforming them into beautiful coloured abstract surfaces while Farthing’s large scale ink brush drawing, depicting parents and children, uses photographs as a source. He imbues his image with a suggestion of a moment caught, an event remembered or recorded, familiar but specific.

Like Farthing, Darren Cabon uses ink for his drawings but applies it with a pen to produce a sequence of intense and highly detailed narratives which draw on his experience, memory and imagination.

Sandy Black’s extensive archive of drawing made directly in the Victoria and Albert Museum are made with a pencil. Through careful observation, they record each individual object, serving as an important aide- memoire for a future publication. These unpretentious drawings are important examples of how drawing can be an insightful tool for the academic researcher.

Donatella Barbieri also uses pencil and paper to great effect to develop characters and costume for theatre design. For her, drawing is an essential process to enable her to communicate the manner in which character and costume become integrated into the live physical performance.

Jessica Bugg extends these ideas of costume design into performance, choreography, video and photography. Her striking films explore the way the moving body, costume and choreography occupy a single creative space.

New technology in the form of digital drawing can been seen in Philip Delamore’s three dimensional ‘on-screen’ drawing constructions which open up new possibilities for designing directly in virtual three dimension, bypassing the need for drawing in two dimension. For Philip the computer screen replaces the traditional sheet of paper.

Likewise Lucy Orta’s interactive pattern drawings Dform exist within the computer as a series of pattern templates within a computer programme which enables the user to custom design their own garment. Orta’s work empowers the viewer drawing them into discovering their own creative potential.

Similarly, Simon Thorogood’s digital projection of a model is a template for the viewer to interact with a 3D computer programme to arrange and re-scale a selection of elegant linear shapes onto the figure to construct a multitude of design propositions. It is here, on the surface of the exhibition wall that drawing meets fashion.